There are perhaps ten places in the original text where a title and name are preceded by the defi- nite article the, as here in the earliest sources for Mosiah 19:15 (namely, “the king Noah”). In the 1837 edition, this extra the was deleted. But in eight other instances of this usage in the earliest text, the original definite article has been retained. And in seven of these cases, compositors and editors have tried to mitigate the strangeness of this construction by adding nonrestrictive punctuation:
In only one case has the original instance of “the
Finally, there is one other possible instance of “the
Here the earliest text reads “the people of the king of Jacob”, but this seems to be an error for an original “the people of the king Jacob”. It appears that early in the transmission of the text
an additional of was inserted. Note that the 1920 LDS edition emended this reading to “the people of king Jacob”, showing that the editors for that edition felt that the of before Jacob was
intrusive. But the 1920 edition also removed the extra the (just like the 1837 edition removed the the from
“the king Noah” in Mosiah 19:15).
For the vast majority of cases, the Book of Mormon avoids the definite article usage before a title and name. Thus everywhere else the text has only examples like “king Noah”, not “the king Noah”. On the other hand, there is no evidence in the manuscripts that the scribes tended to accidentally add the definite article before a title and name. In other words, there is no independent evidence that the original ten cases of “the
This unusual use of the definite article seems to be a Hebraism. In the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, expressions like “king David” are always represented in Hebrew as “the king David”. William Tyndale, the original translator of the Bible into Early Modern English (at least for the New Testament and the first half of the Old Testament, up through 2 Chronicles), consistently translated this Hebrew construction without the definite article, but Tyndale’s successors who completed the Early Modern English translation of the Old Testament were sometimes too literal in their translation. Thus the latter part of the Old Testament in Early Modern English translations had a number of cases where the preceded a title and name, including the following number of cases that made it into the 1611 King James Bible:
As in the Book of Mormon, this Hebraistic usage is very sporadic and inconsistently used, even within these biblical books. (Actually, the five instances found in the book of Daniel are not written in Hebrew but in Aramaic, a related Northwest Semitic language.) All in all, such usage is very strange for modern readers.
The use of the definite article in this construction existed in Old English and early in Middle English, as in the following examples from the Peterborough Chronicle, which dates from the 1100s:
But this usage died out later in Middle English, long before Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament in the 1530s. For example, from William Caxton’s 1485 version of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, we have examples of “kynge Arthur” [king Arthur]—that is, without any the. For these citations from the Peterborough Chronicle and from Caxton, see David Burnley, The History of the English Language: A Source Book (London: Longman, 1992), pages 68–69, 74–75, and 187–188. Alison Coutts points out (personal communication) that the English language uses the definite article for a few specific titles, as in “the Emperor Napoleon” (this usage may be due to the French use of the definite article in l’Empéreur Napoléon).
This sporadic use of the in the Early Modern English Bible appears to be due to an overly literal, but inconsistently applied, translation process. The same may hold for the Book of
Mormon text with its occasional use of the same Hebraistic construction. The critical text will restore these instances of the followed by a title and name—and without treating the name
parenthetically. For other examples of Hebrew-like constructions in the original text of the Book of Mormon, see
under hebraisms in volume 3.
Summary: Restore in Mosiah 19:15 the definite article of the original reading (“the king Noah”); the critical text will avoid any parenthetical treatment of the name for those cases where the original text appears to have had the Hebraistic construction “the